The Washington Post and Simon & Schuster are certainly not the only publishers that want to make money off the public domain report, and the Washington Post edition isn’t even the only one on Amazon’s bestseller list. How do they differentiate? The Washington Post edition contains analysis from Post reporters (who of course work for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos). But if for some reason you’d like an alternative (I mean, an alternative in book form; the Mueller Report is also, of course, free to read online here or at any of a zillion news sites and other places), there’s also Skyhorse Publishing’s edition, which is at No. 3 on Amazon’s bestselling print list. (The value-add on that one is an introduction by Alan Dershowitz.)

Finally, there’s Melville House’s edition of the report, which is in the #6 slot on the list and contains “THE REPORT AND NOTHING BUT THE REPORT: presented as released by the Attorney General of the United States, with no positioning or framing apparatus — such as a celebrity introduction — that would give it bias or impede its clarity.” As of Tuesday morning, this was in the #6 slot. Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson has been tweeting about the book’s production in a delightful thread here.

Live publishing cont: The next problem is how to reproduce the color coded tags representing redaction categories, which aren’t that easy to read, anyway. Can you even see the dark green labels in these redactions? But we have a good solution in mind … pic.twitter.com/L7shqAtWKW

There are also a host of other Mueller Reports for sale, and while traditional publishers have the edge, a self-published edition of the report was #47 on Amazon’s bestseller list as of Tuesday morning. This one has the benefit of being available in print right now, but that’s because it’s simply a print-on-demand version of the PDF instead of being typeset, and according to a customer review it looks like this:

Meanwhile, here in Cambridge, the print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine at the Harvard Book Store — a.k.a. Paige M. Gutenborg — is working away.

It’s important for you to know that someone (anonymously) sent flowers to Paige Gutenborg, our book machine, who has been working very hard printing copies of the #MuellerReport. pic.twitter.com/RWtwE0mZjQ

Owen, L. (2019, Apr. 23). Three editions of the Mueller Report are Amazon bestsellers. How do they stack up?. Nieman Journalism Lab. Retrieved May 25, 2019, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/three-editions-of-the-mueller-report-are-amazon-bestsellers-how-do-they-stack-up/

Chicago

Owen, Laura Hazard. "Three editions of the Mueller Report are Amazon bestsellers. How do they stack up?." Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified April 23, 2019. Accessed May 25, 2019. https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/three-editions-of-the-mueller-report-are-amazon-bestsellers-how-do-they-stack-up/.